i like reading my thoughts after i think them.

nutritional facts: the high-comfort diet.

i moved back on campus for my last year of college, which meant that i could go nine months without cooking a single dish and still manage to eat too much. damn you, dining halls: bacon cheeseburgers made to order, coffee drinks from nestle dispensers, ben & jerry’s pints of ice cream that refuse to be served in bowls. and when you eat one of those with a plastic spoon, there isn’t a single dish to wash once you’re done with dinner/dessert/the-next-day’s-breakfast!

all that comfort food, accessible within an arm’s length, was awesome to have again. i could have whatever i wanted, whenever i wanted it. i didn’t have to plan any meals because i’d just pick up whatever was being served. sure, it was never a high quality menu with any kind of nutritional value or truly satisfying taste, but it was easy, it was there, and it stopped me from feeling like i was hungry. whether i actually was or not didn’t matter; the food was there, and it was already paid for by a meal plan. so i ate it.

i never really liked cooking because relative to take out boxes and drive thru lines, cooking takes a ton of work: strategic planning, detailed selections of ingredients, multiple steps of preparation and inevitable kitchen clean up duties. not everyone can handle cooking, and only a few college kids actually do on a regular basis. because the entire hobby is more expensive and time-consuming.

it’s probably way more satisfying though—
to feed yourself with only your own hard work and enjoyed within your own company.
i never did that in college. ever.
i ate fast food, dining hall food, take out food,
anything that was immediately comforting and required as little effort as possible.
because i never thought cooking could be so enjoyable—
alone
unpredictable
without any kind of guarantee toward an end result
and i never thought i could create AN INCREDIBLY SATISFYING MEAL
full of nutritional value AND taste
with the ingredients that i always had!
all along! 
all this time!
wow, i wish i had the courage to try this much earlier,
before all those bad decisions to eat junk food late at night. 

so now, when i see all the bad things i used to eat, a part of me instinctively gets nostalgic…i mean, it’s what i thought sustained me for so many years. but then i think about how horrible the experience is altogether, and it’s not so attractive anymore. it never really was attractive in itself; it always left me feeling too full of emptiness and somehow still unsatisfied. and every day, i had hoped it’d feel different, but the thing about all that crap is though it feels comforting at the time, it always feels incredibly and inevitably awful afterwards. 

i’m all for eating; it’s necessary to stay alive. but to all the current college kids out there: watch what you put into your bodies, what you ask to supplement your mind and access your heart. just because it’s readily available on campus doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for you, and it can seriously change how you look and feel and are in the long term. they call it the “freshman fifteen” and “transfer twenty” for a reason, so learn to cook for yourself ASAP!

gonna go make myself a burger, and probably follow up with some dessert. and yeah, i’d rather starve than behave the way i used to. i’m seriously ashamed and endlessly embarrassed. THANK GOD that’s all off the menu now, for good.